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What a week it has
been in Scotland: with revelations of the extent of Alex Salmond’s seduction of
Rupert Murdoch, another US billionaire Donald Trump getting grumpy about not
being able to command the vistas and seas around his golf course development, and
last but not least Rangers Football Club being ignominiously sold by the
administrators. Oh yes, and the British economy going into double dip
recession.

It is all-reminiscent
of that last period of acute crisis, a failing, nervous political class and
economic instability: the 1970s amplified by Dominic Sandbrook’s excellent current TV series on the decade.

Scottish debate on the
economy has for many years been shaped by two contradictory strands. The first
has been the power of conventional economics, concerns over our relative
economic growth rate compared to the rest of the UK, and the desire to pursue
‘faster, smarter growth’. This has been the policy of all Scottish
administrations post-devolution and all four mainstream political parties.

The second has been an
aspiration to do economics differently from Anglo-American capitalism and the
British economy and state. This has drawn on critiques of economic growth,
sustainability and green concerns, and debates around health and well-being,
also being pursued in OurKingdom’s openDemocracy debate on happiness .

Post-crash, post-RBS
implosion, the Scots political classes, business community and institutional
chatter economically has had little to say to chart a way out of the wreckage
and find a new course. Instead the unambiguous message has been restoration by
stealth across public life.

This week an important
contribution to beginning to find and flesh out that alternative was unveiled
when Oxfam Scotland launched at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh, before a packed audience, their Humankind Index.

This lottery funded
venture was put together by Oxfam in association with the Fraser of Allander
Institute and the new economics foundation, combining academic rigour with the input of
Britain’s consistently most challenging and original think tank.

What it attempts to do
is track Scots progress and give a very different measurement to GDP. Scottish
people were asked to rate the factors that most contributed to a ‘good life’
and these were then weighed for importance. The results reflected the
overwhelming importance of health and housing to respondents.

They found that
between 2007-8 and 2009-10 Scotland improved overall by 1.2% reflecting
advances in health and housing improvements which compensated for falls in the
economy and material well-being.

The index also looks
at the picture in Scotland’s most deprived communities and has found that they
are 10% behind the national average. The strength of the work is that it looks at
different aspects of disadvantage and inequalities, not just material
inequality, but at such issues as how people feel, what they think about their
community, and how connected they believe they are to others.

What Judith Robertson,
head of Oxfam in Scotland, and Katherine Trebeck, who has headed much of the
work programme, have made clear is that they want to take forward this work on
two levels.

They want to influence
government documents such as the National Performance Framework and challenge
the blind faith commitment to ‘faster growth’ across government. They also have
ambitions to go beyond this: to change the debate, culture, popular aspirations
and the very idea of how we think of and measure progress.

Oxfam acknowledge that
their work is not perfect. We have incomplete data across a host of areas.
Their methodologies in some places are open to debate and challenge. But this
is the start of something important, significant and long-term in a week packed
with big moments.

GDP is not of course
perfect either. Its measurements miss a wide array of human activity and creativity.
It includes things which hardly add to the sum total of human happiness. GDP is
approaching 70 years old having been institutionalised as a measure of economic
progress at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. Increasingly people have
realised using it as a bible as conventional economics has done is not helpful
and actually counter-productive.

The limits of GDP even
reached David Cameron during his ‘compassionate Conservatism’ phase when he indicated
an interest in creating alternative indices addressing GWB (general
well-being). Since then the Office of National Statistics (ONS) have looked at
producing such a measurement, but have decided not to develop one single index.

All of Scotland’s main
parties (the Greens exempted) are committed to a narrow econometric notion of
the world, progress and wealth. This has even been the dominant way of thinking
about independence in the SNP, but there is some small evidence of an open mind
with John Swinney, through Linda Fabiani’s attendance at the launch, welcoming
this initiative.

Oxfam are committed to
progressing this index in association with others publishing it over the next
few years so we can track a different idea of progress to GDP. Trebeck said
that “the financial crisis provides an opportunity to re-prioritise our goals, focusing
on what is really most important to people and what is most influential on our
prosperity and sustainability”.

They have already said
they will publish local humankind indexes after the forthcoming elections. That
is a tantalising prospect: up to 32 alternative ratings telling us where is the
best place in Scotland to flourish, not according to jobs, housing or wealth,
but through a considered measurement of the quality of life.

This is where the
Scottish political and public debate should concentrate: a different kind of
economic debate, social justice and a politics which breaks with Westminster’s
tired traditions.

That requires a very
different kind of conversation informed by a radical vision of the future. And
if that is so it points in exactly the opposite direction from this week’s main
stories: the double-dip recession, and the fixation of our political leaders
with Murdoch, Trump and Rangers FC, symbols of the failed crony capitalism of
the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Reducing human beings
to the dystopian idea of semi-sovereign consumer individuals has not increased
the overall happiness of humanity. Consumerism, shopping and debt-fuelled
lifestyles, the beginnings of which are sketched out in Dominic Sandbrook’s
guide to 1970s Britain, has just produced a world of mass anxiety, insecurity
and fear over keeping up with others or worse keeping your head above water.

We have just been given
the beginnings of a debate which could start to shape an alternative Scotland, one
where we consciously imagine and create our own collective future and idea of
society. Maybe many years from now, if Scotland succeeds in charting a
different route, we might remember this week more for that, than for all the hullaballoo
about the Murdochs, Trump and Rangers FC.

This is an edited version of Gerry Column written for The Scotsman

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